Outdoor Partners impressed with flexibility of XMF workflow

Large-format poster and point-of-sale specialist Outdoor Partners has upgraded its pre-press offering with the installation of Fujifilm's XMF workflow.

John Chandler, operations director at Outdoor Partners, said XMF's support for press-independent production, with the ability to swap from litho to digital right up to the last minute, was instrumental in the decision.

"The XMF integrated imposition engine gives us the ability to stream files to different output devices without having to go back and rework the job," he said.

"This is essential as often the client may change the job from a long, litho run to a shorter, digital run."

XMF, which was launched 18 months ago, uses JDF stripping to define pages, press, paper and finishing in separate layers, allowing changes to be made to any parameter without having to rework the job.

In addition, XMF was the first of the latest generation of workflows to be built on Adobe's APPE PDF-based print engine, which allows for faster, more accurate processing of PDF files.

Chandler said: "As there is no conversion to postscript from the original PDF, we have realised significant time savings in ripping and processing from the input files."